Experts: "We're Fucked"

The industry professionals at The Oil Drum suspect that the real leak in the Deepwater Horizon site is not at the blowout preventer, but 1,000 feet below the sea floor. BP may have even been trying to increase the flow at the sea floor to relieve pressure on the leak 1,000 feet below.

The post is full of technical industry talk (and rather badly edited) so it is hard for me to figure out exactly what they are saying, but there seem to be two further catastrophes to fear. Apparently the sea floor there is just silt that doesn't really provide any support for the blowout preventer. The preventer is just resting on the 1000 foot pipe beneath it, which now seems to be buckling. The other problem is that the sea floor itself might be opening up, causing the whole oil reserve to come to the surface at once. I'm not sure how this outcome is compatible with the worry about the pipe collapsing, since it seem to imply that the sea floor is a solid mass that can shatter, which they just said it wasn't. I'd like to see more explanations of this stuff.

Update: Prof. Goose from The Oil Drum has stopped by Unfogged to explain some things http://tinyurl.com/3xunewu. He points out that the article is by a TOD commenter, not a regular writer. Goose points to comments on The Oil Drum thread that undermine dougr's original post. A guy calling himself R2-3D points to other signs that would be present if there had been a casing blow out beneath the sea floor. Maybe we should leave this to the experts to debate before we reach higher levels of panic than we have currently.

An outstanding example of the banality of evil

The Guardian is reporting that a secret World Bank report attributes 75% of the recent rise in food prices to the push for biofuels in the US and EU (via). The use of sugar-cane based ethanol in Brazil was exonerated as a factor, however. The report contradicts the Bush administration claim that biofuels are responsible for less than 3% of the rise in food prices. The Guardian further claims that the World Bank has suppressed the report to avoid embarrassing the Bush administration.

Rising food prices have pushed 100,000,000 people below the global poverty line, leading one UN expert to call the push for biofuels a "crime against humanity". If that's true, it is an outstanding example of the banality of evil. The worst crimes in the world today? Genocide in Darfur, Torture in Gitmo, and politicians wooing Iowa voters with ethanol subsidies. It's like finding out that kissing babies at campaign stops gives the tots cancer.

Exxon Mobil's PR firm creates "homemade" YouTube spoof of An Inconvientent Truth

The DCI Group, a PR firm working for Exxon Mobil, has an excellent record of creating the appearance of grass roots support for their causes on the web. They are the force behind Tech Central Station, a blog that appears to be a news for nerds type website but is actually devoted to spreading unwarranted doubt about global warming and endless positive messages current energy policy.

DCI’s latest? The video "Al Gore's Penguin Army," appears to be a homemade spoof of An Inconvenient Truth posted to YouTube by 29 year old named "Toutsmith," from California. The Wall Street Journal, however, has discovered that the video was actually posted from DCI computers in Washington DC. For those who subscribe the full story is here. For those who don’t here are some highlights.

Nancy Snow, a communications professor at California State University, Fullerton, viewed the penguin video and calls it a lesson in "Propaganda 101." It contains no factual information, but presents a highly negative image of the former vice president, she says. The purpose of such images is to harden the views of those who already view Mr. Gore negatively, Dr. Snow says. …
Traffic to the penguin video, first posted on YouTube.com in May, got a boost from prominently placed sponsored links that appeared on the Google search engine when users typed in "Al Gore" or "Global Warming." The ads, which didn't indicate who had paid for them, were removed shortly after The Wall Street Journal contacted DCI Group on Tuesday.

Via Dale Jamieson on the ISEE list.